A productive -- if crazy -- day

This is my kitchen. I love my kitchen. It's one of my favorite things about this apartment. There's enough counter space to actually make things. The sink is large, there are lots and lots of cabinets. However, today, a war was waged in my kitchen that reduced it to looking like this:

What, you may ask, happened to the once brave and clean expanses of counter top? Where did the shining, empty sink go? I had quite a few adventures in the kitchen today, but I'm happy to say that all of them were quite successful. 

A good deal of what I did today involved stocking up my freezer with individual sized portions that I can just defrost after work. This was my freezer at the start of the day. Nothing terribly exciting. Pretty empty. 

This is what it looks like now. I'm excited!!

First off, I made a concentrate that I can use for broccoli soup. Basically, when I want to eat some, I just have to thaw the concentrate, heat it up and add milk and anything else that I want. My basic "cream of ______" soup recipe doesn't really use measurements. It's all about the ratios. So, you need three parts of chicken or vegetable stock, two parts of your vegetables, and one part of dairy. Your dairy can be milk, cream, half and half, yogurt, sour cream... Anything really. I also partially steamed several servings of broccoli and froze them. Maybe I'll make a stir fry or something out of them later on. 

I also made a base to use for tomato soup. I would just like to point out how neatly this tomato continues the apparent tradition of MASSIVE produce in South Korea. It's as big as my hand, and I have pretty big hands. Since I'm apparently incapable of making soup in small enough quantities for one person to reasonably finish in a few days, freezing it seemed like the only option. In fact, I already have a large container of potato soup left over from my last soup making attempt in the freezer. 

While all of the soup simmering was going on, I baked two and a half pounds of chicken breast, lightly seasoned with olive oil, salt and pepper, then I shredded it to be frozen in smaller portions. I'll be able to pull it out and use it in a wide variety of dishes in the future. 

This is one pound of peeled fresh ginger. Apparently, when you peel an entire pound of ginger, the enzyme or whatever inside of the ginger that gives it a pleasant spice transfers itself to your skin in such large quantities that your hands will burn for the next hour, despite repeated hand washing. Just so you know :) I used this to make candied ginger, which was a first for me. 

The candied ginger is in the pot on the left. The pot on the right is Alfredo sauce that I also made to put in the freezer. A note to my future self: Don't ever make two delicate, time-sensitive dishes that both require constant stirring at the same time. 

When I was stirring the ginger in the pot, it was still a liquid. As soon as I turned off the heat and literally rotated to my right to dump the mixture out onto some aluminum foil, it had turned into something that was granulated and solid again. It was pretty amazing. Now I have a lot of candied ginger AND some awesome ginger infused sugar!

A close up of the ginger. It always reminds me of Christmas, somehow. Maybe it's the way the sugar sparkles like lights?

Next up was another new recipe. I'm going to a cookie exchange on Saturday, so I needed 3 dozen cookies. I posted a recipe for some red velvet cream cheese cookies on my facebook last night because they just looked so amazing. Unfortunately, that particular cookie recipe called for a box of red velvet cake mix. Which just doesn't exist in Korea. So I went to bed last night a little sad, as I contemplated my lack of red velvet. This morning, I woke up determined to find a way around this minor setback in my quest for red velvet cookies. I did some googling and found a recipe that I could make pretty easily here. I modified it a little bit, and decided to bite the bullet and give it a try. 

Here we have the finished product: Red Velvet Chocolate Chip Cookies. Oh. My. Word. They were amazingly delicious. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from a cake turned cookie, but whatever my expectations may have been, they were far exceeded. This recipe is definitely going into the notebook where I write all of my favorite recipes and cooking tricks. It might even be my new favorite cookie. 

Finally, I used some of that candied ginger to make ginger molasses cookies. This is an old favorite recipe of mine. I've made them lots of times. But it was exciting to make them with ginger that I'd made myself!

In the middle of this cooking frenzy, I got a text message from my school requesting my presence at a ceremony that evening, so I had to run off and leave my kitchen a complete disaster. This is one of those times I'm thankful that I live alone -- I don't have a roommate to drive crazy with stuff like this! 

Old habits die hard... Or not at all...

 When I lived in Lafayette with Katie, we had a running joke. One of us would make a pot of soup in the winter, but we'd never measure. We would just use whatever was in the fridge and make soup. This was great for cleaning out the fridge. This was bad as far as the quantity of soup went. There were only two of us, and we always had what we affectionately referred to as the "vat of soup" when it was done. 

When I came to Korea, I thought my days of soup vats were finished. You see, pots are ridiculously expensive here. Also, stoves are considerably smaller, meat cuts are entirely different, and chicken stock just doesn't exist. I've managed to find meat cuts that you can sorta, kinda use in something that almost resembles soup. And I've had bullion shipped over from the States. So I'd made a few batches of soup, but the closest I could get to the fabled vat was my crock pot. 

Then I was at Home Plus last week to buy a Christmas tree. I did get a Christmas tree, but I also happened to walk past the clearance aisle, and I saw a beautiful, stainless steel stock pot. And it was only about $15!! I was so thrilled that it went into my cart straightaway. I came home, and I realized that here was something that was truly worth making soup in. I could feed an entire army out of it! I made beef stew last week. It was rather nice. But I made a rather large pot. I've been eating it every day for a week. Plus I've had people over. Plus I've sent leftovers home with said guests. ::sigh:: Apparently when you no longer have a roommate, it takes twice as long to go through a giant pot of soup. 

Tonight, as I was walking home, I thought it would be a great idea to make another pot of soup. Potato soup this time. I decided that I would actually follow a recipe so I didn't have massive quantities of soup to deal with this week. I dutifully followed the recipe and chopped up 8 potatoes. The only problem was that instead of the nice, smallish pot of soup I was expecting, I ended up with this:

That's right. My giant stock pot is half full of potato soup. It's delicious, but I have SO much of it now. Katie, I'm sure that somehow this is your fault. I didn't have these problems before I lived with you. I feel that it is now your duty to come to Seoul and help me eat some of these giant pots of soup. I'll even make another one for you, since I think potato soup with cheese and milk would be a rather bad idea. 

For everyone else -- does anyone want some potato soup??

A freak of nature

I was making some beef stew tonight when I realized that I forgot to buy carrots at the store this week. So I ran down to the vegetable stand on the corner of the street to grab some. The lady had the single largest carrot I had ever seen in my entire life. I made a large quantity of soup. It had 16 cups of stock in it. That's a gallon, for those of you who are counting. This one single carrot was enough for the whole pot. 

The freakishly large carrot, next to a standard teaspoon for reference. 

It was so incredibly large. This is it standing up on it's end. See how small the spoon looks waaaaaay down there? It was so large that when I sliced it in half, it behaved like a very ripe watermelon. I cut the bottom half and the top half split and cracked all on its own. I didn't know carrots could do that. 

The side view. I had to cut this thing into 1/8s, and it was STILL rather large chunks for a soup. 

Homemade Tomato Soup

There are two things to look forward to with the weather getting cooler: sweaters and soups. I love both of these things, and this time of year is just perfect for them. It isn't bitterly cold yet, but the air is tinged with enough cold that I can dig out my soup pot and throw on a sweater. 

Sometimes it can be difficult to make soup here. The "normal" ingredients that are considered staples in most American kitchens become luxury items here. A few more stores are starting to carry things like chicken bullion cubes, but it's quite expensive. You can get things like carrots, potatoes and celery. Whole chickens are relatively easy to find, so you can make your own chicken stock, but I don't have time for that most days. 

Similarly, it's nearly impossible to find chunks of beef for beef stew. Larger pieces of beef that can be cut up are also rare, and they are so expensive that I practically never buy them. So, what's a girl to do? Tomato soup! I didn't like tomato soup much when I was a kid. I was more of a chicken noodle kind of girl. But at some point in my adult life (I honestly don't remember when) I decided that tomato soup with basil was pretty much the most amazing thing ever. 

I used to keep a can of Campbell's on hand during the winter, and would make tomato soup and grilled cheese, and it was simply lovely. But I can't get Campbell's in South Korea. Today seemed like a good day for soup, so I decided to pull out my recipe and make some. The good news about this recipe is that it's really easy to make no matter which continent you live on! The ingredients are readily available in Korea (I got just about everything at my local mart) and they should be found in most pantries in America as well.

Here is our cast of characters. 

12 oz of tomato paste

1 1/2 cups water

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp sugar

seasonings of your choice, to taste (I used basil, oregano, salt and pepper this time)

3 cups of milk

Mix all of the ingredients except for the milk into a pan. The baking soda is going to make things get a little foamy, so be sure to leave plenty of room. The baking soda may seem like a strange ingredient, but it does two things. It helps remove the slightly strange taste from canned tomato products, and it provides some alkaline to counteract the acid in the tomatoes. This will help make sure that your soup doesn't curdle when you add the dairy. 

In a separate pot, heat the 3 cups of milk. You want the tomato mixture and the milk to be roughly the same temperature. I find it works best when they are both just getting ready to start bubbling. You don't actually want the milk to bubble. It's a little hard to see, but it looks nice and cream and foamy, a little bit like it is at your favorite coffee shop. That's what you want it to look like!

When both pots are about the same temperature, add the tomatoes to the milk about 1 cup at a time. In between each addition, mix the milk and tomatoes well. Adding the tomatoes a little at a time helps the ph change slowly, and it gives things more time to adjust. This will also help make sure that your soup doesn't curdle, and give it a nice, creamy texture. 

This is what it should look like when you're all done. Creamy, tomato and basil goodness. 

You can serve it with a little bit of cheddar cheese, or some sour cream if you're into such things.  

What better way to finish off the meal than with some golden oreos? I love these. I like them more than their chocolate counterparts. You can get chocolate oreos in Seoul quite easily, but this is the first time I've seen the golden ones. I was in the local 7/11 to pay my electric bill a few days ago and happened across them. I bought the entire stock!

Things I've Seen and Done

This last week has been quite busy. Midterms are approaching at school, and the number of student visits and faculty meetings increase proportionally to the number of days left until the exam. The international Korean TESOL conference was this weekend, and it was two full days of sessions, lectures and workshops. Some of it was really good, some of it was really bad. And of course, because I'm me, there has been lots of cooking, entertaining, and even a bit of crafting in the interim.

I've been thinking that I really should do more to show some of the random stuff that I see all the time around Seoul. I've decided to try a weekly feature called "Things I've Seen and Done". I'll take pictures of various things throughout the week to try to capture a bit more of the daily flavor of life in Korea and I'll do my best to post each Sunday night, Korean time. so without further ado, here are a few representative pictures from my week. 

These trucks that sell roasted chickens are quite common. I've never actually bought a chicken from one of them, but they're usually pretty cheap. I think this particular truck was two chickens for $10. There seems to be one for every neighborhood.

However, I was surprised to walk down the street a few nights ago and see this truck. I've never seen a truck selling anything other than chicken or produce. 

A close up for all of you seafood fans out there. The design was quite good. There were jets of hot steam blowing up from those metal shelves. I don't know if they were cooking, or just warming the crabs. But there we have it. It just goes to prove you never know what you'll find in the back of a truck around here. 

On the way to the conference, we found a really amazing hole in the wall Mexican restaurant that actually had decent prices! I was so excited that I forgot to take a picture. However, this soup place was just a few buildings down. If you can't read the caption, it says "Only the pure in heart can make a good soup". There are cute-ish English sentences that go with just about every restaurant here. This is one of the better examples, because it is actually grammatically correct!

I finally found the toothpaste I've been looking for all my life. If you notice on the left side of the box, this toothpaste is proudly Anti-Calculus! 

We had a lesson on writing process paragraphs in one of my writing classes. I showed them some clips from the movie, "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" and then we made our own list of things to do to lose a guy. 

This is an essay from one of my students. They were supposed to do some freewriting. Two of my students who sit next to each other decided to write about New York City. This student writes:

The New York City is dream for many people all over the world. 

There are many things. But among those things, most impressive aspect is people.

They are called New Yorker. And they walk New York streets, eat hot dog, take a taxi,

run to their office. That is real, not a movie. 

Her friend had a much longer paragraph, but my favorite section of it was:

New York is symbol of fashion, freedom and young, I think. So New York city is charming city. Maybe if I'm in New York, I wear trench coat, high hills (I think she means heels), and left hand bring newspapers or right hand hold Starbucks coffee. It's all woman's romance. Oh! and I will eat brunch in cafe - like sex and the city. 

Later on, I put them in groups or work on brainstorming topics and outlines for their homework assignment. One group of students decided to write about "How To Survive As A Foreigner In Korea". I asked them if they wanted any help, because I was a foreigner, but they said they had it covered. When I looked at their outline, I discovered that there were three simple steps to surviving as a foreigner here. 

1. Respect my elders.

2. Learn Korean drinking culture.

3. Make some friends in Itaewon.

As a side note, Itaewon is the foreigners district. Apparently the only part of Korean culture we are supposed to engage is drinking culture, but we should do it with other foreigners. ::sigh:: If only I would have know this a year ago :p

Finally, on a more domestic front, some girls came over and we made some cinnamon rolls. They turned out quite nicely!

And as a result of my trip to the Craft Market, I've taken up crocheting again. Yes, it's a little bit early, but it takes time to make snowflakes for Christmas. At least I don't (usually) listen to Christmas music while I make them!

How do you say "Quesadilla" in Italian?

I had one of those "only in Korea" moments tonight.... I went out with a friend to celebrate her birthday. We went to one of my favorite restaurants in Seoul. Everything I've ever had there has been delicious. Given this track record, I decided to try the quesadilla .

You have to understand -- Mexican food is nearly impossible to come by in Korea, and the recently opened Taco Bell is considered to be among the best available... I had low expectations going into this meal, but I had faith in this particular restaurant. Besides, I figured the worst case scenario, I'd get a flour tortilla shell with some chicken and cheddar cheese melted together. Oh how wrong I was....

It looked really promising at first! The tortilla shell was a lovely golden brown. It smelled pretty good, and I could see some green peppers peeking out. Given past experiences with Mexican food in Korea, I knew that it would be a fatal mistake to take a bite without opening the tortilla to look inside. I almost couldn't believe it when I first looked.

There was chicken that had been marinaded in something to make it quite dark. The first bite confirmed that it was in fact a balsamic vinegar marinade. There were vast quantities of red onions and green peppers, which I was ok with. But there were also vast quantities of garlic cloves and shredded cabbage, which is not something I typically associate with Mexican cuisine. But the kicker to this balsamic-garlic-cabbage quesadilla was the cheese. In my worst case scenario, I'd envisioned cheap cheddar cheese. What I was faced with was both terrifying and puzzling. There was ricotta cheese in my quesadilla. Ricotta cheese doesn't really melt well, it certainly isn't Mexican, and it is ridiculously expensive in Korea. I have no clue what it was doing in my dinner that was masquerading as a quesadilla, but there it was.

It wasn't bad, per se.... But it definitely wasn't terribly delicious. The mix of flavors and textures was just off... I will say it is definitely the most creative take on Mexican I've ever seen, and perhaps also the most Italian... At one point, it occurred to me that this was probably the kind of dish you'd watch someone make on the Food Network, think sounded interesting, but never actually want to make at home.

At least now I know for sure -- if I want Mexican food in Seoul, I'm going to have to try to make it myself.

Making Sausage

Despite the setbacks with the butter, I have been able to figure out some good substitutes for other items from America that I miss. It's actually been rather fun, having to cook everything from scratch. Of course, I don't always have time to do this kind of cooking... But it's been a learning experience!

I recently made sausage, and several friends have been asking how I did it. Being a bit of a food geek, I read a lot about making sausage online, and combined several different recipes to come up with a pretty good blend! Of course, you can adjust the spices for what you have in your kitchen, but this is what I use.

2 lbs of ground pork (you want to find pretty fatty pork, so the cheaper the better! For readers in Korea - you can get a really good ground pork for this at Costco)
2 tsp dried sage (I use ground, not rubbed, but it probably doesn't matter)
1 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp dried oregano (if you like a milder, sweeter sausage, try marjoram instead)
2 tsp sugar (if you like a maple flavor, substitute 1 tbsp brown sugar)
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes (this does give it a bit of a kick, so adjust accordingly!)
1/4 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp salt (I use kosher salt, so if you're using ordinary table salt, reduce to 1 1/2 tsp)

That's basically it! Just mix everything together. It takes awhile to mix, because you want to get the herbs and spices mixed really evenly. I usually use my hands to mix this up. You can let it sit and cure in the fridge for a day or two if you want, but this isn't necessary.

From here, it just depends on what I'm making my sausage for. You can roll out the meat to cut it into patties and freeze them for breakfast sausage. You can cook it loose for gravy, lasagna, soups, etc. You can freeze it in rolls to decide what to do with it later. I usually try to let it sit in the freezer at least a week before I use it, but that's not always the case.

The sausage I made today will be used for biscuits and gravy tomorrow, so it's still ok if you just want to make it fresh.

That's it! Sausage isn't so very mysterious. If you get meat that doesn't have enough fat in it, you can get pork fat from a butcher. This is important to help it taste more like sausage. I've never seen ground pork in Korea that didn't have a good meat to fat ratio. If you look at the package of meat, and you can see the fat mixed in the meat, you're probably ok.

The beautiful thing about sausage is that it is very forgiving. You can add all sorts of different spices and in different amounts. But I really love this sausage recipe. It's definitely better than the store bought sausages in America!

Baking in Korea

When I first came to Korea, I was a little bit scared that I'd never really be able to bake. In the beginning, I went to rather desperate lengths to assuage that fear. Then my new arrival came, and I thought that I'd be in baking heaven from there on out. There was just one small problem. Ingredients.

I thought surely I could find the basics like flour, brown sugar, and salt with no problem at all. And I can. It just takes a lot of hunting. There are a wide variety of flours here, none of which seem to really be the same as "all purpose flour". You can get light and dark brown sugar, but they are much more extreme than brown sugar in America. I often end up mixing the two together to get something that has the right flavor and texture. Salt comes in a wide variety of colors, flavors and textures. It is conveniently located next to the packages of MSG. However, it has been difficult to find normal table salt.

At this point in my stay in Korea, I've managed to figure out how to work around almost all of these sorts of things. There is just one thing that continues to plague me -- butter. Butter can be quite expensive here. About $8 per pound. And it isn't even true butter. It's a strange mix of butter and margarine. Margarine only comes in tiny tubs of 200 grams, which isn't really any sort of convenient measurement. I was looking at the rather pitiful examples of butter for sale in my local grocery store when I noticed that there was a new contender to be considered. It was margarine, and it came in a 1 pound block, and it was only $1. I was a little leery because of the price, but I figured it couldn't hurt to give it a try.

It looks perfectly normal, right? This was a relief. Sometimes when I buy what I think is butter, and what is labeled as butter, is really some sort of semi-translucent shortening thing. It's pretty nasty. 

The package says "pound margarine" which seems fairly innocuous. I was making banana bread, so I decided to soften the butter a bit to help with the mixing. That was when I knew I had problems. 

This is what the softened margarine looked like. It doesn't look like anything out of the ordinary. Except this is after being in the microwave for over three minutes. When I took it out, the solid part was still the exact same texture it was when I put it in the microwave. It also had a distinctly plastic smell. Oh, the horror! 

Needless to say, the $1 "pound margarine" was a decided fail. Oh, well. I went and bought some actual butter, and my banana bread turned out quite well!